


Faultlines

by gazeteur



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Post-TLJ, TLJ Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 20:57:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13303062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gazeteur/pseuds/gazeteur
Summary: The deadpan voice doesn’t startle her, not anymore, but she can’t keep the tension that has suddenly manifested out of her spine.“Are you only here to tell me this?”When he doesn’t answer she turns, and is surprised by his proximity. He’s moved to sit unbearably close to her, assessing her handiwork—or theirs, since she’s barely done any work on the lightsaber yet—in silence.——Ben teaches Rey how to repair her lightsaber, sort of.





	Faultlines

Rey’s always been a fixer, a restorer, a scavenger of things beyond repair. But this, she thinks, is new territory.

The weapon emerges in fragments from the same drawer where the Jedi texts are kept; Rey plunges a hand inside the space, fingers brushing along the well-worn spine of the sacred documents as she scours for the errant pieces. A terminal here, and a dislodged power cell there, which she drops into the palm of her other hand.

At her workbench she takes stock of the pieces: a lightsaber hilt split down in half widthwise, each side cradling its own shard of the kyber crystal, surrounded by a smattering of metal pieces.

It doesn’t take long for Rey to shift into scavenger mode; her fingers run along the exterior of each part methodically, mentally taking notes of their damage—and eventual repair. When it comes to the main pieces, Rey pauses. A thought cuts into her self-imposed rationality: holding out the lightsaber when it was still whole, when it still had another owner. Then, on a whim, she wraps her fingers around the pale blue crystals, which warm to her touch.

A voice from the other end of the room, or the other end of the galaxy, “They’re unstable.”

The deadpan voice doesn’t startle her, not anymore, but she can’t keep the tension that has suddenly manifested out of her spine.

“Are you only here to tell me this?”

When he doesn’t answer she turns, and is surprised by his proximity. He’s moved to sit unbearably close to her, assessing her handiwork—or theirs, since she’s barely done any work on the lightsaber yet—in silence.

His quiet, assessing eye thaws her hostility, if only slightly. Then he pinches the middle finger of his hand and shucks the glove off.

“There is a solution,” he says quietly, hand hovering over the pieces, fingers half-bent and aglow under the warm light of the desk lamp. Her cheeks warm, reminded of a memory not so very long ago, before forcing herself to pay attention. “Rebuild with the more viable crystal and—”

She catches on immediately. “Oh.”

“Yes.”

“But that’s your way.”

He shrugs, the brisk rise and drop of a dark shoulder.

 

* * *

 

Rey, undaunted by the challenge, scours for parts all over the _Falcon,_ rummaging in drawers and prying open crates.

Every day seems incomplete: there are times when she emerges with a power cell but no modulation circuit. On another, a fistful of parts that can be repurposed into energy gates, enough to refurbish six lightsabers.

She sees him rarely in this phase: lurking at the corners of her vision while she digs into another crate filled with spare parts.

Occasionally he murmurs a suggestion to her, which she heeds—after a careful scrutinisation on her part—but doesn’t acknowledge with anything but the briefest nod and a stiff “Thanks”.

This time, before she can whip around and confront him about his creeping she is interrupted by a triumphant cacophony of beeps coming from BB-8, who has somehow tagged along on her endeavour.

“Great job, BB-8!” Rey reaches out to inspect whatever well-meaning metal bob the droid has recovered, ignoring the dark, intrusive smear—and accompanying tug of disdain—in the outskirts of her vision.

 

* * *

He is pithier in their later encounters, but still as close as ever. Rey ignores him, which is easier to do with a safety mask flipped down over her face.

When she’s bent over the lightsaber at the worktable, turning pieces around, discarding them for another, better one, and slotting a blade emitter shroud into the gutted hilt, Rey feels eyes over her shoulders judging her work. She wills her hands to be steady, for the solder lines to be clean.

Rey is used to solitude, but not to the silence of another.

“How do I know you’re not leading me astray?” she asks, swivelling in her chair. The safety mask tints her vision a few shades darker, making the room seem more dimly lit than it is. “Suggest that I put the emitter matrix on backwards and blow up the _Falcon_. Do you not want that to happen?”

He picks up a power cell, the chunk of metal gleaming gold in the light. Puts it down. “No, not anymore.”

“Then why are you helping me?”

Silence, that stretches infinitely on. Rey watches him, seeing the way he corrects himself a hundred times inside his head and amends the words he will say to something that is simultaneously stripped of all emotion—and brimming with it. “I want to see it repaired.”

 

* * *

 

The saber emerges imperfect yet whole, lighter for all its repairs—stripped it down to its rudimentary parts—and yet still unbalanced, like the wobble of the antiquated ski speeders across the red-tinged salt flats of Crait.

Rey still has the other crystal stowed in a drawer by her workbench, which she can’t seem to implement without overpowering the circuit. Even if she does, the structure is all wrong. She turns it round and round in her grip while sitting cross-legged atop of her bunk, hand behind her head. 

With no other example to follow, the lightsaber is like his now, with a crudely shaped crossguard fashioned from scrap durasteel; and yet not: turning it on unsheathes a serrated, quivering blade sized more like a long knife than a proper sword. Its lighter weight is far removed from her trusty staff. The blade makes a coarser noise, like the shearing of metal, as she swings it in lazy circles to test its heft.

Unbalanced. Unstable. It feels devastatingly _wrong_ in her hand.

 

* * *

 

Rey isn’t sure when she fell asleep. She’s still sitting up on her bunk, sighing slightly as she lifts her head up from its aching droop. The faraway chatter and intermittent hiss of doors opening and closing have died down; it must be late, or whatever that means in space.

She’s too couched in a post-sleep lull to notice him before, standing—slouching, always too much for a too-small space—by her bed.

His eyes are elsewhere. So she follows it down: to the splay of her hand, to the lightsaber beneath.

Then he makes a reach for it, with a reluctantly familiar bend of fingers gloved in black.

She doesn’t know what he intends, so her next move is ruled by reflex.

He stills when her hand and lightsaber both nudges under his jaw in warning. Then a slow, cautious tilt, away, until all Rey can only see him in profile, light falling differently on his face—half of it mired in shadow.

They stay like that for a moment, before Rey inclines her head in question.

A disbelieving huff of breath, almost a scoff. “So eager to defeat me,” he says, low and taunting.

In a slow, measured movement Rey angles his face towards her. He makes no move to get up or to push her hand away. He has that undecipherable look on his face that makes her want to reach out and—

A skein of darkness plucks at her mind, unravels the words she means to say. Slowly her thumb drifts to the switch faced into the hilt.

The anger is there in his eyes, it will always be there, but there is a different quality to it. Rey feels his breath shakily brushing over the knuckles of her outstretched hand.

And passes over it.

Abruptly he stands, and the moment is lost.

It lasts only a second but, to Rey, it feels like the moment in the cave on Ahch-To, with the countless Reys stretching into a dark infinity. And it feels just as unknowable.

Her hand falls away, the lightsaber making a dull, useless noise as it meets the sheets.

“It’s fixed,” he says, half a question.

And Rey is torn, cleaved by what the fixing of her lightsaber means and what it does not; the things that will begin and those that will end. _Will this end as well?_ she thinks, feeling the jagged edge of unfinished metal dig into her palm from her tight grip. “Ben—”

Through their bond she feels the dulling of their connection, the shuttering of his emotions and thoughts before seeing his figure become more incorporeal—until nothing remains.

He is gone.

And Rey knows she cannot follow—not yet, not in this way.

 

* * *

 

Spited or emboldened by his initial words about her lightsaber, it takes Rey a day to tear it all down and rebuild.

When she is done, what remains is a mishmash of her old life—a central spine culled from her quarterstaff—and the fragments of a new one that she can’t quite make sense of yet. It will never be the same, but it will be hers.

Her smile is wide, triumphant when the saberstaff ignites with a flick of a switch, capping both ends with balanced, streamlined plumes of blue.

**Author's Note:**

> Took some liberties lightsaber mechanics-wise! And thank you guys for the response and kind words on my last reylo fic <3


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